A friend sent me a link to A Dark Room and at first I thought it was a Twine-based game because it was entirely text and seemed to have the fairly simple interface that Twine supports while telling a story. However, that quickly changed as the game started getting a little more complicated beyond simple button clicking. It was the first game in a while that had me interested enough to stay up late to finish (I started at 4pm, ended at 11pm, with breaks in between).

A Dark Room is text-based, but relies more on JavaScript and HTML5 to simulate animations and simple graphics, like a cooldown timer bar. The game follows along the theme of “innovation through the ages,” a term I just made up right now, for the type of games that incorporate disparate other video game types into one game. The first game of this “genre” I played was Frog Fractions. Another game along similar lines, but perhaps much more tightly done, is Evoland. I haven’t played Evoland, but the concept certainly looked interesting.

A Dark Room starts off with a simple button that you click, transforming the dark room (from which the title derives its name from) into a lit room. The discovery of fire, literally, sparks the foundations for the rest of the game. You are a humble forager with a builder who offers her services to evolve your little dwelling into a larger village. Your first skills after the discovery of fire are foraging for wood and building traps. As your village becomes more populated, you quickly realize it’s become a resource management game.

It’s not until you buy a compass that you can progress further, unless, of course, you happen to like building things and are quite content at remaining at home. Nevertheless, the compass enables you to venture far and wide RPG-style – sort of. You are restricted to how far you can roam by water and cured meat, provisions which are necessary for any adventurer. You are also limited by how much you can carry. The humble village you have is enough to enable an exploration within a certain radius, encountering critters and crazed old men along the way. Your first weapon is a bone spear made from wood and teeth. Your armor is made out of leather.

By exploring this initial radius, you also find iron mines and coal fields. You may find an iron sword to use, or, if you are incredibly lucky, a steel sword. Enter the industrial age. With each new “age” that you enter, the larger your inventory and water capacity is, enabling you to travel farther out afield. By equipping yourself with items made out of the latest metals discovered, you also become more formidable against stronger opponents.

Eventually, you find an abandoned spaceship. We have entered the space age, which happens to still coexist with your humble hunter-gatherer origins. Your village still chugs away, producing the resources you need. If you’re lucky, you may come across an alien gun which uses alien chargers as ammo. I found it odd that your village can’t produce the alien chargers, but then again, I didn’t fully explore the map on my first play through. I won’t spoil the game, but I will say the space age is the last “age” in the game.

A Dark Room is as simple as I have illustrated it above. However, maybe it’s my min-maxing interest as I found the resource-management part of the game more interesting than the MUD-like RPG part of the game. The past two days, I’ve loaded up a new game and just let it run while I’ve been working on other things, checking in every so often to make sure my traps are still there and reallocate my workers. I’m sure it defeats the purpose of the whole resource-management thing, but I found it was much more enjoyable when I had a stockpile and could just buy what I needed all at once rather than twiddling and waiting.

As it is a “short” game, it certainly has some replay value as the RPG-map is randomly generated. And, at least for me, the resource management part of “Can I do better?” is another reason why I’ve been loading it up again and again. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are speed run guides popping up. I would say it’s worth checking out. It’s not too intrusive that you can’t multitask, but I also understand that a Pause button would be nice. It does auto-save every x-minutes, so if your browser enables localStorage (i.e., you’re not using Private Browsing/Incognito), you can close and reload it as you like. Also, the code is open source and I had a lot of fun poking at the documents to see what things I’ve missed on my first play through (and considering writing my own, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for that).